So, in Darktide enemies all have fixed HP based on difficulty level. Which makes breakpoints extremely important. ie, does it take one shot, two shots, or three shots to kill this trash mob? How many charged plasgun shots does it take to drop this giant armored Ogryn? Weapons have a bunch of stats that determine their performance, and as you level a weapon up it’ll get some perks and damage buffs. But the perks, at least, are semi-random. You can have a weapon with perfect stats and bad perks and buffs. You can change the perks and buffs, but only two out of four total. And you can only change the perks to other perks you’ve unlocked by sacrificing a weapon that has them.

So, you need to get blessed by RNJesus to get the perks that are good. Then you need to sacrifice the weapon so you can put it on another weapon with good stats. Then you need to actually get that weapon with good stats, and level it up, and hope that at least two perks/buffs are good so you can replace the other two.

And all this requires resources that you have to collect by playing the game.

The result is it takes ages to level up weapons assuming you get good rolls.

And it all sucks. I just want to play the higher level content, but that’s contingent on getting weapons that can hit important breakpoints. When you’re getting swarmed by a hundred unhinged covid deniers the difference between killing in one hit or killing in two or three is life and death. You can do it with less than perfect weapons if you have a good team, but I mostly play with randos so the team quality is in the hands of fate. And even with a good team and perfect weapons it’s hard and it’s easy to get wiped in seconds if you get hit by the wrong combination of enemies, or someone gets thrown off a ledge by an explosion, or two people get incapacitated at the same time, or you get flanked by flame throwers from two direction, or a billion other things.

If the game was just designed to be balanced so the weapons had predictable performance and you could choose what buffs you wanted from a list you could just… play the damn game. Instead everything has to have RNG and crafting and random loot drops and blah blah blah I yearn for the days when weapons had no attachments and the devs could actually balance the stupid things because no one had invented the idea of manipulating people to make the games addictive.